Review: Chimpanzee succeeds in spite of Tim Allen

Film Review: Chimpanzee (3 stars)

3 stars

Nature documentaries can sink or swim based on their narration. For instance, if you watch the 2005 Academy Award winner March of the Penguins in its original French, you won’t hear the unforgettable baritone of Morgan Freeman, or even its Gallic equivalent. Instead, it features voice actors speaking in the first person, or rather first penguin.

Chimpanzee, the latest from DisneyNature, is a wonder to behold but irritating to be-hear. Blame Tim Allen, whom the little ones at which the film is targeted will recognize as Buzz Lightyear.

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Or rather, don’t blame Allen directly, unless he wrote the narration himself. Not five minutes can go by without him delivering some cutesy comment about the apes, who quite frankly don’t need any assistance in the charming department.

Chimp enjoys food; Allen chirps, “yum yum!” Older chimp makes a mess of his food; “Not a lot of family photos with grandpa!” What I wouldn’t give for a narration-free cut of the film. Or one by primatologist Jane Goodall, whose institute was involved in production.

Heck, Werner Herzog would be better than Allen. Imagine: “The jungle is a dark and cruel place, brimming with angst and scatological horrors.”

If you can get past Allen’s anthropomorphizing — and mind you, that’s a big if — you’ll find a 78-minute film that is by turns captivating, startling, thought-provoking and as cute as — well, as a baby chimpanzee.

That would be Oscar, the adorable young simian who was followed for more than three years by co-directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield (they also made the 2007 nature doc Earth) and their intrepid cinematographers. Naming him Oscar seems a bit baiting, but at least the filmmakers did not stoop to calling his mother BAFTA.

Oscar is one of a troupe of 35 chimpanzees living in an Ivory Coast rain forest. Their alpha male is named Freddy, while a rival group is organized under the leadership of a chimp named Scar, which tells us which ones we should be rooting for.

To a melodious score of piano and strings, plus one toe-tapping jazz number, the film follows Oscar as he plays in the jungle, learns to forage — oh, and loses his mother. (Hey, it’s a Disney film!) When she dies, the assumption is that her orphan baby will perish as well.

But then something astonishing happens. Freddy, senior simian and general curmudgeon, adopts Oscar and starts treating him like a son. It’s awww-inspiring. Now if Allen would just shut up about it.

Other wonders include the scene in which the chimpanzees form a hunting party to bring down some local monkeys for food. With a game driver, a blocker and a hunter working together, they successfully capture their prey. It’s not graphic enough to scare the kids, but it may be morally disturbing for adults. It felt like watching a death match between second and third cousins; you don’t really want either side to triumph over the other.

The camerawork is marvelous, with footage of the chimpanzees occasionally interspersed with time-lapse images of plants, spiders and other forest creatures at work. There’s a mini-making-of (shot by the chimps?) that plays over the end credits and shows some of what the film crew had to go through to make this astonishing documentary. Hard work, but the results are top banana.

Chimpanzee opens wide on April 20. A portion of the opening-week proceeds will go to the Jane Goodall Institute — which I’m hoping means less money for Allen.